Seems to be back up now for us. Once the crisis is over, it would be nice to have an explanation of why the problem occurred and how we can mitigate it in the future should it happen again. Our customers blame us when these outages occur.

This is fixed now. There was a problem with the API database replication where we lost the key table. Everything was backed up, everything was restored, and we're putting checks in place to catch this from happening again. Its the first time we've had a problem that wasn't trapped by checks before becoming an issue. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to everyone and we will be learning from this situation to provide better communication on the API pages.

Thanks Brendan. The explanation is appreciated, as is the quick fix. This did raise a question for us that I'd like to get clarification on. If you guys decide to change either the request syntax or response content at some point, how much notice will you be giving subscribers so that we can update and distribute new versions of our apps?

We currently integrate your service in an iOS mobile app, so it generally takes a minimum of 7 days to get an update through the Apple review process and out to our users, so we need a good bit of lead time to make sure we can adapt to the change without service interruption for our users.

How will you make that notice - I'm assuming via our account emails, but just want to clarify?

And will this notice policy apply to users at the "Free" subscription level as well?

We're aware of how integrated the API is into apps, and the review period required for code changes and app stores submissions. We try and keep all of that in mind when making updates. When we update new data in the coming months, we'll be making new versions of the features on the URL. Right now we're looking at the idea of making /astronomyV2/ for example. We'll post here, on Twitter, and on the API stats pages when we'll be making changes, but the goal is that current users will not be affected until they decide to take advantage of the new features.